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Comment Re:Every company should do this. Fight fire with f (Score 3, Interesting) 50

It's the law that is absurd, though. Italy's "piracy shield" forces all service providers (including DNS and VPN vendors) to block any IP address or domain name that they put on a blacklist, within 30 minutes from publication. Only Italy's equivalent of the MPAA are allowed to add to that list: you can't use the system to protect your own copyrighted works, only the media oligarchs can. There is no appeal procedure if you are unjustly blocked.

Last year "piracy shield" disabled Google Drive in the whole country for a day because someone had shared links to watch football matches on a Google Docs document.

That said, it's not lost on me that Cloudflare expect themselves to be above the law, and that they don't want anyone to rule the internet because they want to be the gatekeepers themselves.

Comment Not a "refactoring" (Score 2) 272

C++ and Rust are very different languages. Rust's safety requires you to use different abstractions and public interfaces compared to C++, even if only to wrap everything into "unsafe" sections. And Win32 APIs are in C, not even C++. This is not going to be a "refactor", but a rewrite, an operation that historically has often gone wrong in software engineering. And it will be done by AI and in a management-imposed hurry...
My prediction: the old pieces of Windows that somehow still work will become just like Microsoft Teams.

Comment Modern websites (Score 4, Interesting) 71

There seems to be a trend for "modern" websites to be made up of unsearchable, undiscoverable collections of pieces of text with no formatting besides a huge sans-serif font and extremely wide margins. There's no paragraphs and little headings. Most of what you see is generated text, and you struggle to find actual content because navigation elements, such as menus, are rare and have no visual hint about their nature or function. Often, they're generated as well (e.g. "things you might need", "in the spotlight", "featured"). Icons and colors aren't used, and pictures are just meaningless stock images that you have to scroll away.

Usually there's a huge title header that takes up two-thirds of the vertical length of your viewport, and there's no way to enumerate the content of the site, because all you get are vague links ("your municipality", "services for you", "house and environment"). In the end you have to use Google to search for anything, which can land you to an old, unindexed page that is no longer the current one for whatever you were looking for. This is especially true because another thing with modern websites is that URLs tend to be meaningless or short-lived, because sites are either "single page" or served by a CMS that changes every six months.

Finally, the concept of vertical scrolling is broken by useless, unusable tricks such as endless scroll or, for front pages, something fancier that makes the site look like a children's pop-up book (all of this coming from the same people who in the 90s told us that <blink> was a crime against humanity).

Maybe it's because of the "mobile-first" design of modern websites, but I don't think so, because typically the mobile version of said sites is even less functional, with everything that can't be easily implemented as a scrollable sequence of short text sentences being painful to use or just missing.

Comment Tech companies are nightmarish (Score 1) 74

AI is certainly a problematic technology, but what really is nightmarish is that such technology is the latest and most powerful lever in the hands of gargantuan tech companies that are devoid of any moral considerations and wield more power than any person or organization in the history of humanity has ever had.

Comment Yay (Score 4, Insightful) 114

Even more red tape and gatekeepers who get a say in who can communicate over the Internet and how hard it has to be. I remember when it was Microsoft who wanted to make internet protocols more complicated in order to get a competitive edge over the open source community; back then when their plans were exposed there was outrage. Nowadays Google and Apple basically are the internet, and they don't need to work in the shadows to subvert the protocols, because whatever it is that they decide for the day is automatically the "living standard".

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